On January 25th, Pluto entered Capricorn. When the Tiny Little Planet of Great Big Power crossed that line into the first degree of Capricorn, humanity was introduced, once again, to a new chapter in its evolution.  Pluto’s tenure through this no-nonsense earth sign will restructure humanity’s vision for about 15 years.

In my last Skywatch I wrote that the 13-year-tenure of Pluto in Sagittarius was not going to be finished with us until its fiery swan song of late December. Not only Jupiter and Pluto but the Sun and Mercury too were going to be overlapping in the sky, deepened in significance by their alignment with the Galactic Center.1

The Jupiter-Pluto Conjunction We are not quite finished with Pluto in Sagittarius. Or, if you will, it is not quite finished with us.This month the transit will begin its swan song with a fabulously apt coupling: The Dark God will conjoin with Jupiter, the planetary ruler of Sagittarius. What a way to mark the receding tenure of the planet of destruction in the sign of crusades.

The Saturn Return is one of the most talked-about transits in astrology. It is known as the time when the chickens come home to roost, responsibility-wise. Here comes adulthood, ready or not! Provided that we live at least thirty years, all of us will experience a Saturn Return. The question is whether we will step over this threshold with an attitude of acceptance, or kicking and screaming.

Saturn’s entry into Virgo, an ingress that happens once every thirty years, took place under skies that were shimmering with significance. It happened a few days before the New Moon, also in Virgo, on Sept 11th; and this was a New Moon with a vengeance: not only was it a Solar Eclipse, but it took place on a date that has become iconic in the collective imagination. Moreover, it occurred during a Grand Cross in mutable signs. It was a celestial sonata beginning with a cymbal crash.

Mars (now in Gemini) squares Uranus on September 3rd. The Sun (now in Virgo) opposes Uranus on September 9th. Jupiter (still in Sagittarius) will be squaring Uranus October 9th. This will pit all the three other mutable signs against the planet of wild and sudden changes, now in Pisces, the most mutable sign of them all.

Pyro-philes and party people, rejoice. Half the planets in the sky will be in Leo at some point during August. The rosy-cheeked optimism of fire comes sprinting onstage at the outset of the month in the form of a Jupiter-Sun trine. The Sun being in Leo, which it rules, and Jupiter being in Sagittarius, which it rules, means they’re each in their very favorite places to be. And anyone with planets around the tenth degree of Aries gets major bonus points: the trine in the sky will form a Grand Trine to your own natal placement, blessing you with a…

The Saturn-Neptune opposition, whose last shimmering exactitude1 hangs in the air as July begins, has made its goofy, ridiculous, tragic and potentially enlightening mark upon the consciousness of the world over the course of the last three years.  This tug-of-war between the planets of realism (Saturn) and surrealism (Neptune) has given us a fools’ paradise of disillusion2, meltdown and revelation. We saw water disasters wipe out villages in Southeast Asia and inundate a great historic city in the USA as if they were sand castles leveled by the tide. We saw flat-out fraud used to elect the leader of the most powerful country…